Obama is gone. The "green queen" Angela Merkel is struggling over coal. Britain is brexiting the green EU. Japan is silent, while China and India burn coal like crazy. Russia never did care. And so it goes.

CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen cuts to the point -- that billions of people in Africa, india, and elsewhere are systematically being denied reliable access (or any access) to electricity by cold-hearted bureaucrats and elitist governments who have decided for these people that no electricity is better than fossil fuel electricity (or even hydro). Yet when people do gain access to affordable energy, their productivity can skyrocket.

Winston Churchill called Russia a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. We could say Obama’s energy and climate policy is confusion wrapped in muddled thinking inside obfuscation – and driven by autocratic diktats that bring job-killing, economy-strangling, racist, and deadly outcomes. President Obama was recently in China, where his vainglorious arrival turned into an inglorious snub, when he had to use Air Force 1’s rear exit. He was there mostly to join Chinese President Xi Jinping and UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon to formally sign the Paris climate treaty that Mr. Obama insists is not a treaty (and thus does not [...]

By Paul Driessen|2016-09-13T08:01:03+00:00September 12th, 2016|CFACT Insights|Comments Off on Confusion, muddle, obfuscation and racism

General Electric, one of the world’s largest suppliers of electrical power plant equipment, is all fired up about large markets for new coal-fired generation in India and China as America’s shut down. This may seem quite a turnaround for a company which has been characterized by the National Center for Public Policy Research as “the poster boy for crony capitalism and corporate America’s green energy cheerleader." After all, GE had previously assured investors that coal was on its way out. Its “ecomagination” campaign launched in 2005 focused the company’s future on an “Age of Gas” powered by their heavy-duty turbines along [...]

The year of the Big Hype continues, with President Obama and President-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton proclaiming that, in Paris, global warming has been curtailed thanks to a non-binding agreement that allows unfettered coal production and more by China, India, and a host of other nations who are also to become recipients of European and American cash -- lots of it. Meanwhile, of course, ISIL (sic) has been fully contained, and any "evidence" (such as the San Bernadino murders) to the contrary is nothing more than workplace violence (this time against co-workers who must have given insensitive baby shower gifts).

Obligating the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, and send billions of taxpayer dollars annually to dictators, bureaucrats and crony industrialists in poor countries would be disastrous. Thank goodness it did not happen. But we are not out of the woods yet.

Global temperatures have remained steady for almost 19 years, the United States has not been hit by a Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane since 2005, total polar ice is increasing, not melting, and seas are rising at barely seven inches per century.

Countries like India and China are boycotting the UN's climate conference in New York largely because the UN is much more interested in justifying its fear-mongering than in solving the real-world problems facing developing nations today. The sacrosanct UN models are unreliable, even dead wrong, and yet the UN continues to impose severe restrictions on development that is not tied to so-called renewable energy with little concern over the near-term health and welfare of hundreds of millions of people living without electricity, running water, or other amenities that most Westerners take for granted.

CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen says that Big Green groups, which demand accountability from corporations and denounce all projects requiring fossil fuel energy, refuse to be held accountable for the death and destruction that results from their vetoing of electricity, food (including Golden Rice), and life-saving technologies to the poor in India, African nations, and other nations lacking adequate infrastructure. Some countries are fighting back against these unwanted pests -- Canada took away Greenpeace's nonprofit status, while India has banned the use of foreign NGO money to support domestic campaigns.

The presumption that carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants are so dangerous that we have to shut them all down to save the planet is ludicrous, says Alan Caruba. Citing CFACT advisor Bonner Cohen's data, Caruba notes that jhuman activity accounts for just 4% of worldwide atmospheric CO2, and the U.S. contribution to that total is dwarfed by emissions from new power plants in China and India. Six unions have joined with CFACT to fight these rules, which threaten 37% of the current U.S. electricity market that relies on coal.